Asian-Americans have seen their ranks swell over the past decade not only in coastal immigrant enclaves and the San Gabriel Valley, but also in new places such as the southwestern states of Texas and Nevada, according to a report released last week by a coalition of Asian-American organizations.

The report shows the largest Asian-American populations have remained in California and New York, but traditionally smaller communities shot up between 2000 and 2010, more than doubling in Nevada and growing 95 percent in Arizona.

Over the decade, Asian-Americans grew 72 percent to more than 1.1 million in Texas, giving the state more Asian-Americans than Hawaii, according to a report released by the Asian American Center for Advancing Justice, a coalition of four Asian-American advocacy groups.

The study also found large growth in Asian-American populations in the Southeastern and Midwestern states, particularly North Carolina, Georgia and North Dakota.

Jack Fong, assistant professor of sociology at Cal Poly Pomona, said those migration patterns can be explained by the entrepreneurial spirit of many first-generation immigrants.

“They want to make money,” Fong said. “They will go where there’s a market for them.”

Fong said, for example, an immigrant from Pakistan hoping to open a Pakistani restaurant in Los Angeles would face stiff competition from similar restaurants. Such competition is less likely to exist in the South and Midwest.

“If you go to Florida or if you go to Nebraska you can sell your culture as a commodity,” Fong said.

Immigrants from poorer Asian countries are even more likely to move to such states, Fong said.

“For them, dealing with a little racism or a harsh winter – that doesn’t matter,” Fong said. “They look to America as a country that holds all these dreams that their poor countries could never give them. They have a higher tolerance level for (B.S.)”

Charlie Woo, chairman of the Center for Asian Americans United for Self Empowerment, a Pasadena-based advocacy group, agreed with Fong.

According to the study, Asian-American owned businesses employ approximately 3,000,000 people and have an annual payroll of $80,000,000.

“Clearly Asian-American entreprepeurs are making contributions to the economy,” said Dan Ichinose, director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center’s demographic research project.

The report, which was largely based on Census data, shows Asian-American numbers grew 46 percent over the decade. The figure includes people who identified as Asian along with other race categories on their census forms, Ichinose said. The report also shows large increases in the number of South Asians. The Indian population grew by 68 percent to nearly 3.2 million and Indians now account for 18 percent of Asian-Americans, up from 16 percent a decade ago, the report shows.

The smaller Bangladeshi community more than doubled to 147,000 and Pakistanis doubled to 409,000, according to the report.

Deepa Iyer, executive director of the nonprofit South Asian Americans Leading Together, said the community’s growth stems from a mix of new immigrants here on work visas or seeking to reunite with family members in the United States, as well as the children of immigrants who came here several decades ago.

Woo and Fong both said the recent wave of Asian immigrants differs from previous waves in two important ways: their wealth and education level.

“Most Chinese, Koreans, Indians came in with an educated background,” Fong said. “That makes them much easier to plug into the American economy.”

What the report doesn’t show is the impact of the economic downturn on Asian-Americans, since much of the census data spans the past decade or a significant portion of it, said Karin Wang, vice president of programs and communications for the Asian Pacific American Legal Center.

But Wang, whose organization led the research for the report, doesn’t see any dramatic change to the trend driving Asian-Americans to destinations beyond traditional hubs in California, New York and Hawaii. In many of these inland locations, Asian-Americans are getting involved in local politics, she said.

“Communities that aren’t used to having Asian-Americans in the mix of their neighbors are going to start seeing Asian-Americans aren’t just foreigners who live in Chinatowns in Los Angeles or New York,” Wang said, “but are people who live around the corner.”

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